Category Archives: Supporting Your Right to Bear Arms

Just like a momma bear defending her bear cubs, this mother wasn’t about to let her baby or herself become victim to a criminal intruder.

According to the The Indy Channel on March 24, 2016, a woman heard someone breaking in through a window in her baby’s room in the middle of the day. The woman quickly retrieved her gun and headed to the baby’s room. When she entered the intruder raised his gun and fired twice at her, missing both times. The woman fired back and hit the criminal multiple times. He was later taken to the hospital in serious condition.

This is just one of countless examples where law abiding citizens use a firearm in defense of themselves and their loved ones. You can read many more examples at the Armed Citizen.

February 3, 2017 | NRA-ILA | This week, President Trump kept one of his most important campaign promises by nominating an originalist judge – Neil Gorsuch – to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last February. Scalia was the court’s foremost practitioner of originalism and textualism, judicial philosophies that seek to resolve constitutional questions by reference to the language of the document, as publicly understood at the time of its enactment.

This approach led Scalia to author the historic opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which confirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for defensive purposes.

Judge Gorsuch’s embrace of originalism is a bulwark for our Second Amendment rights. When given the opportunity to consider the matter in his professional capacity, Judge Gorsuch has made clear that he understands the importance of the right to keep and bear arms.

In a case concerning a technical question of what the government must prove to establish a violation of the Gun Control Act, Judge Gorsuch noted that the “Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own firearms and may not be infringed lightly.” His statements in that case strongly indicate that he would hold the government to a high standard before allowing it to strip someone of the right to keep and bear arms.

Merrick Brian Garland (shown), nominated by President Obama on Wednesday to fill the vacancy left on the Supreme Court with the untimely passing of Antonin Scalia, has left footprints. They tell of a judge who isn’t interested in supporting the rights America’s citizens enjoy under the Second Amendment.

In 2007, Garland voted to rescind a D.C. Circuit court’s decision that invalidated Washington D.C.’s strict ban against handgun ownership. That law, which even prohibited guns citizens might keep at home for self-defense, was struck down by a three-judge panel, but Garland voted to reconsider the ruling. He was joined by Judge David Tatel, known for his anti-gun bias.

In 2000, the National Rifle Association challenged egregious and illegal expansions of the Brady Bill in a lawsuit against then-Attorney General Janet Reno, in NRA v. Reno. The NRA challenged a Justice Department regulation that provided for a temporary gun registry to be generated during background checks — just exactly the type of registration Congress explicitly previously prohibited. In finding for the Justice Department and against the NRA (and, by extension, every legal gun owner in the country), Judges Tatel and Garland wrote:

Finding nothing in the Brady Act that unambiguously prohibits [the] temporary retention of information about lawful [gun] transactions … we affirm the [lower] court’s dismissal of the complaint [by the NRA].